The future home of Blue Moon’s RiNo brewery (Eric Gorski, The Denver Post)..

MillerCoors’ Blue Moon Brewing is planting a flag in Denver’s burgeoning craft brewing district, laying plans to open a new brewery and tasting room in River North after signing a lease on a 26,000-square-foot warehouse space, The Denver Post has learned.

Set to open in 2016, the new Blue Moon location at 1910 38th Street — across from a Pepsi bottling plant — will provide a more visible public profile and added brewing capacity for recipes getting a try-out as a possible Blue Moon seasonal or specialty beers.

The property — now a vacant warehouse with a barrel-shaped roof near 38th and Delgany — is owned by environmental consulting firm Menalto LLC, records show.

Blue Moon Brewing Company at The SandLot, birthplace of the company’s wildly successful namesake Belgian-style wit, will continue to operate as it has for 20 years in a corner of Coors Field, Blue Moon founder and brewmaster Keith Villa said.

“We are at the point where we need a larger place to innovate and create all the recipes,” Villa said. “We have so many ideas, and just such a limited amount of tank space at the SandLot. It’s really time for us to have a bigger place so we can experiment even more.”

Villa said the main brewing system at the River North location will be two to three times bigger than SandLot’s 10-barrel system, and also feature a two-barrel pilot system. The Blue Moon beers you see in stores and on tap handles nationwide are brewed at MillerCoors’ breweries in Golden and Eden, N.C. Company officials would not provide the estimated cost of the River North project.

Blue Moon Brewing Company founder and head brewmaster Keith Villa (provided by MillerCoors).

Blue Moon’s place in the American brewing scene is complicated, to put it mildly. The flagship wit was around way before the current craft beer boom, introduced about the same time as the founding of several of Colorado’s pioneering independent craft breweries.

MillerCoors likes to call Blue Moon the country’s best-selling craft beer. But you won’t find the MillerCoors name anywhere on a Blue Moon bottle or can, one reason Boulder-based trade group the Brewers Association singled out Blue Moon in its “craft vs. crafty” campaign of 2012 that called for truth in labeling and accused megabrewers of trying to blur lines and confuse consumers. The BA’s definition of “craft brewery” excludes Blue Moon because of its corporate parentage and size.

“What better place to locate our new brewery than in River North, the arts district?” Villa said. “To me, it’s a fantastic synergy — the perfect time, the perfect storm for the two entities to come together — River North and Blue Moon Brewing Company.”

Villa said Blue Moon looks forward to being in a district teeming with breweries “because we have actually influenced a lot of breweries in our 20 years of existence.”

Still, that remains a brewery tucked into the corner of a ballpark. A stand-alone brewery in River North — where brewery walking and bike tours are flowering and Great Divide is building a large new brewery and tap room — will give Blue Moon far greater visibility.

Villa mentioned possible collaborations between the four-man brewing team at the SandLot and the new team at the River North location, which will include full-time and part-time hires, he said.

The news of the new Blue Moon brewery comes as Molson Coors and other big brewers are stuck in a decade-long decline in sales of mainstream and light brands.

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